Thursday, November 24, 2011

After 8 and a half months of trying to lower the temperature of the Reactor Pressure Vessels (RPV), which by the way are broken and probably devoid of melted fuel, TEPCO announced they would now try to raise the temperature to avoid hydrogen explosion.

It seems like another non-reason why they do and do not want to reduce the amount of water in the building basements. (If they reduce the water level too much too soon, the ground water will seep in more - something like that. The ground water keeps coming in anyway.)

TEPCO announced on November 24 that the work had started on reducing the amount of water being injected to Reactors 1 - 3 at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in order to raise the temperature inside the Reactor Pressure Vessels.

The RPVs are thought to contain hydrogen. If the RPVs are cooled too much, the steam inside the RPVs will become water, making the atmosphere inside the RPV too dry and increasing the danger of igniting hydrogen. At the same time, TEPCO has started the preparation for injecting nitrogen into the RPVs to expel hydrogen inside the RPVs.

The amount of water injected to Reactor 1 will be reduced by 0.5 cubic meter per hour (currently 5.5 cubic meters/hr water is being injected), and the amount of water injected to Reactors 2 and 3 will be reduced by 1.5 cubic meter per hour (current amount is 10 cubic meters/hr). Right now, the temperatures at the bottom of the RPVs of Reactors 1, 2 and 3 are below 70 degrees Celsius. TEPCO wants to raise them to slightly above 80 degrees Celsius to maintain the amount of steam. As soon as nitrogen is injected inside the RPVs, the amounts of water injection will be restored to the existing level, the company says.

So far, nitrogen injection has been to the Containment Vessels.

Well let's see. According to the latest plant status by TEPCO (11/24/2011), the temperatures at the bottom of the RPVs are:

Reactor 1: 40.4 degrees Celsius

Reactor 2: 68.3 degrees Celsius

Reactor 3: 66.6 degrees Celsius

And here's TEPCO's diagram of the effect of the gas management system on Reactor 2's CV. It doesn't make sense whatsoever, as it depicts a reactor that was leaking gas from all over the place but now has stopped leaking, thanks to the gas management system that sucks out the gas from the CV. But isn't it cute that the melted fuel is depicted still nside the RPV?

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comments:

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't TEPCO suppose to be in cold shutdown. Hell, they don't even know where the corium are at, and now they are just trying to avoid criticality explosions. TEPCO has been behind on this thing the whole 8+ months. Mark my words, this all is NOT going to end well, and probably sooner rather than later.

The colors of the steam, or air around the reactors say it all..blues, greens..and flashing lights--lights inside Reactor 1, lights of various colors such as red, blue, green, and bright white flickering in the grass, in the air and sky around the Nuclear Plant. Yesterday, it was an addition of a new feature, a column of blue "gas" into the sky from the venting stack--NOT good.

"But isn't it cute that the melted fuel is depicted still nside the RPV?"

Actually the pic doesnt say so. This is the way how a round RPV TEPCOhole is drawn, below is a opened square hatchet, labeled [nirogen steam] ... corium has flown down through these, now far down, unseen below this pic.

All three blobs waiting for an explosive meeting. Imagine, whole fuku at once. When japan has sunk, nobody will enquire after TEPclowns drawings.

The molten mass is digging deeper in the baserock by the minute. When corium, u235, u238, pu239 - hits the ground water table at 20-30meters, it will explode. Some scientists calculate it will be 6 to 12 months from now... Joined together, all the fukupools of 35000 tons of nuclear fuel ignites and will sink Japan - and tsunami will do that on all Pacific Rim countries. World will become unstable and most life will disappear. Exactly how Isaiah prophesied:

"...and the foundations of the earth do shake. The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly. The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth." Isa 24

TEPCOkings definitely will earn what they sow.

However, similar situation was told to happen in Chernobyl. They did something, actually did. What was it. Some scientist fear it will still splode. Chernobyl = Wormwood: "and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter..."

LOLZ at the video above. Could there be a better example of pointless fear-mongering?

And all this utterly useless hand-wringing over corium hitting groundwater like a turd in a toilet. For christ's sake the stuff is already surrounded by the tons of water in the basements. If you think its melted its way through the floor (but that miraculously the water didn't follow it!?), the purity of the corium has already been compromised by enough melted concrete, steel, dirt to the point where it doesn't generate enough decay heat to melt stone anymore. But I quite like the end of the world overtones given by the biblical quotes. No doubt it will please the Rense crowd.

Its the same with every announcement. Tepco announces something, and the millennial crowd jumps on it as an indicator of impending doom. It was the same with the rising water in the trenches, with the opening of the doors to the reactor buildings, with the discovery of hydrogen in the pipes... every announcement leads the conspiracy-minded to expect some Armageddon-triggering event. When it doesn't happen, they move on to the next catastrophe, almost hoping for it to be spectacularly destructive so their paranoid fears can be justified. The meltdown made me lose faith in the mass media, but the aftermath has made me lose faith in the alternative media. Now we have gullible people posting pictures of flashes of light, calling them "neutron beams".

It is interesting that the "anons" screaming that everything is "fine" in Japan can offer no statistics-at all-to support their positions. Do people really think that the Japanese people are so stupid and blind?

Japan sits on the ring of fire. There is no way there won't be another 6.0 or above within six months. If Tepco cannot stabilize the reactors there will be an explosion.

@Lili, "Do people really think that the Japanese people are so stupid and blind?" - I think many Japanese are realizing they have been exactly that, stupid and blind. At least for a decent portion of the population, the nuke disaster has been a wake-up call.

As the author of the above posts at 1:51 and 2:04, I can promise you that everything is not at all fine. But it doesn't mean that neutron beams are "flashing" out of Fukushima (and caught on camera!), and it doesn't mean that we can divine the future of Fukushima by reading Revelations.

I also don't think we'll be seeing any more explosions, but I sense that this is something you and I will not see eye-to-eye on.

Finally, Japan is a country of 120 million people. I know that a lot of posters like to imagine the population as being some sort of like-minded army of automatons that only believe in preserving the harmony of the group, but you might be surprised to find out that there is a huge diversity of opinion and discussion going on regarding the disaster.

The molten mass is digging deeper in the baserock by the minute. When corium, u235, u238, pu239 - hits the ground water table at 20-30meters, it will explode. Some scientists calculate it will be 6 to 12 months from now... Joined together, all the fukupools of 35000 tons of nuclear fuel ignites and will sink Japan - and tsunami will do that on all Pacific Rim countries. World will become unstable and most life will disappear. Exactly how Isaiah prophesied:

You are only now realizing that you are on the wrong side of the dimensional rift.......keep drinking.

Re: Anonymous said..."Do people really think that the Japanese people are so stupid and blind?" no, i DON't think TEPCO is, I think they were up to something at Fukushima Dai-ichi.

They were up to something. It is already known a weapons program was going on at Reactor #4 and the fuel pools.

Oh, and those are neutron beams, there have been more than one report of them.

BTW, the post above theorized that they have 6 to 12 months for the coriums to reach groundwater; it won't take that long, because the water table is not 20 to 30 meters deep. They've got less than 4 months until the coriums hit the water table. And TEPCO's got no plan to deal with it. Hell, they don't even know where the coriums are at.

This is a very difficult topic and I can say for sure only that Tepco is in desperate fear what could happen.They lied and downplayed the whole thing, mostly by not telling what they really knew.

But, this useless talking about neutron beams etc is counterproductive as long as there is only chatter and no proof, no real measure results that can be analyzed. Transuranics have been sprayed all over the zone and so there are for sure radioactive hotspots that emit neutrons in addition to alpha, beta and gamma. So neutron emissions found far away from the accident site actually cannot seriously be taken as proof that there are recriticalities.

The same criticism should be kept against "china syndrom" panicmongery. If we assume the mass has left the RPV then we have to admit that it is highly improbable that there is still any movement in the mass, we cannot even be sure that it is still liquid as if it has left the RPV it eventually has been diluted with all possible things, reducing the heat density probably below the melting point, possibly even without any water cooling, having formed elephant feet and similiar structures.

Again, this fearmongery only results people been distracted from looking at the REAL DANGERS STILL LOOMING TO HAPPEN!

As we do not know where the corium really is we cannot even exclude the possibility that most or even all of it it is still contained in the RPVs. Please read the text of a german nuclear engineer he posted here (in german, use translator) http://tec-sim.de/fukushima/90-wasserstoffexplosion

We can only be sure of one thing: Tepco is desperate in searching for ways to avoid the probably highly explosive gas mix in the reactor vessels to detonate, that could make the primary containment pop open and possibly shoot the reactor contents high into air like mortars.

Such a nightmare must be avoided at all cost, as it is impossible to tell for sure if the weakened RPVs would still be able to contain this.

Even if such an explosion only blows some tubes outside the RPVs, and thus restricting most of the releases to the immediate area around the reactors, this could make the spent fuel pools completely inaccessible to human kinds.

This again in consequence would eventually lead to a chain reaction that ends with the fuel pools falling dry, leading to dozens of used reactor fuel loads burning off at open air, dwarfing all what the world has seen of nuclear catastrophes until now.

THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN, AT ALL COST!

However there might be other reasons for Tepco doing so and not telling us about, like cost savings taking into account many risks.Remember, such a mentality was the cause Fukushima accident could happen at all by the tsunami flooding.

So we have to keep extremely wary to not be betrayed again and again. Thanks again to ex-skf for keeping us informed what is going on in this nuclear nightmare.

Thank you atomfritz - there are real dangers, real health risks to some people, and even the threat of further catastrophic release. But the mindless speculation about "neutron beams" (all arising from a poorly translated press release from Tepco back in March) is just a "bright shiny thing" for gullible people to get distracted by. Recriticalities will cause much more havoc than errant flashes of light on a video camera feed (in fact, they won't cause any light at all). Likewise with all the "China syndrome" anguish. I am not enough of an amateur physicist (sly wink) to know how hot a mass of corium will burn if it has several square meters of concrete and rebar mixed in with it, but I think the flows have probably reached a point where they have stabilized. I disagree with you about the risk of the contents of the reactors blowing high like a mortar (I don't think the reactor cores can sustain any kind of pressure, and I hope that the nitrogen injections have ameliorated the danger of hydrogen explosion - at least in the pressure vessels).

Oh - and before I forget, I find the story of the weapons program at #4 to be as dismally pathetic as the notion that an earthquake machine caused the tsunami. Its conspiracy theories like these that make me fear for humanity.

Utter nonsense. Flashes of light are not the same thing as neutron beams. Neutron fluxes are products of fission reactions, which don't happen without a lot of heat and the creation of some very nasty side products. And, for those who are interested, neutrons are not the same as photons... neutrons do not produce light.

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

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Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

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